


Come Home

by VirginiasWolf



Category: Death in Paradise
Genre: Afterlife, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Heavy Angst, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-07
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2020-08-11 15:40:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20155984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VirginiasWolf/pseuds/VirginiasWolf
Summary: Camille knows that she is going to die on the hospital table. Death isn't always so bad though, especially when it means being reunited with loved ones you thought you'd never see again, including a certain very special someone.





	Come Home

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry. You will cry. I literally ended up bawling when I came up with this idea, but I think it's terribly comforting in its own way. I know its short, but again I was literally crying as I was thinking this up, so I decided not to make it too long of a journey. Title taken from the hymn "Softly and Tenderly" which became stuck in my head as I was writing.

Camille has been shot twice before, but she knows something is different about this time. Her limbs feel cold, and although she can see the doctors working frantically in an attempt to save her, she can't feel them. She knows she is going to die on the table. No, actually she knows she already has.

  
The room is filling with others. Others whom the doctors working on her can't see, but she knows are no longer alive. She's heard stories that this is what happens when you die. Your loved ones arrive to escort you to whatever comes after.

Great aunts and uncles she hasn't seen since childhood, and Aimee is here too. She thinks she can see another figure hanging towards the back of the crowd, but who?

  
She decides to focus on the grandmother she was named after, Catherine's mother. "Are you here to take me to the afterlife?"

  
"Oh Camille, you were supposed to have such a long life." Her grandmother's eyes are filled with tears, but Camille is still too much in shock to let her own fall, at least until the older woman adds, "Someone very special is here to take you home," before stepping aside allowing Camille to finally see the figure who was lingering behind everyone else.

  
Richard Poole. The last time she'd seen him was the day he laid dead with the ice pick sticking out of his chest, and for a moment it is as if she is seeing him alive again, except she knows she is not. She is only seeing him again because she is now also no longer living. Still, she races to him, finally letting the tears fall as she reaches his arms.

  
For a moment she buries her face in his shirt, not wanting to ever let him go. Then suddenly a different fear takes over. Although she had previously been convinced that she would not be returned to the living, she is now terrified that the doctors will manage to pull a miracle and she'll be pulled back into the world where she can no longer see him; a world she knows she doesn't want to be part of.

  
She becomes vaguely aware of Aimee touching the lead doctor on the shoulder, a touch which causes him to step back from her body looking defeated. The body which she now realizes she is staring at from an outside perspective. "Call the time of death."

  
She knows she should be saddened that her life has been taken from her so soon, after barely forty years on this earth. She should hate herself for not fighting harder to keep her mother from being left without a daughter. All she can see though is Richard.

  
"Tell me you'll never leave me again," she instructs as she looks his eyes.

  
His eyes are wet too, but his voice is strong. "I'll never leave you again Camille."

  
This time, she knows that he means it, and for the first time in many years Camille feels like she has finally come home.


End file.
